Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I speak to the report of the House Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources entitled Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. I thank the member for Hunter for his comments. This is a very well thought out report which identifies a whole range of issues in relation to agriculture, climate change, climate variability, drought and rain. Irrespective of what people think or do not think is happening in terms of the climate, I think this document is quite valuable as a policy document in a whole range of areas relating to things like landscape management through to various types of land use, right through to the sequestering of carbon in the soil and all the other issues that revolve around the climate change or global warming debate.

I would particularly like to congratulate the chairman of our committee, Mr Dick Adams, for the way in which he has chaired the committee. As the member for Barker mentioned, I have been a member of this committee for some years now and he was a previous member of the committee. Irrespective of who has been the chairman—the member for Hume, Alby Schultz, did an outstanding job—if an individual came in, they would not be able to pick the partisan politics in relation to the issues. That is to the committee’s great credit and I think that is reflected in this report. I notice the member for Barker was trying to score a few political points in relation to some of the things that are mentioned in this report, such as biochar and some of the technologies that farmers have adopted. He saw that as an endorsement of coalition policy. That may be the fact but I think it says more about the committee than about partisan politics in that the committee has taken evidence from the community and made certain recommendations in its report as a result of those findings. In no way has anybody—

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